Инструкция по извлечению ePub из app-books

One thing that might keep many people from even considering an appbook regardless of price is the idea of having it tied to an app. Some might find only ever being able to read it on your iPhone, or the app taking up one of a (relatively) finite number of available icon spaces to be insurmountable handicaps, and pass up a book that they otherwise might have bought.

I am here to tell you now: don’t worry. Contained within the disguised ZIP file that is the iManual.ipa application, within your My MusiciTunesMobile Applications directory, is an easily-extractable unencrypted ePub file of the complete book.

Once you’ve unzipped it, it can be read in ePub-reading software such as Adobe Digital Editions (looks flawless) or FBReader (formatting a bit messed up), or even synced into the iPhone version of Stanza by sharing from Stanza Desktop. (Though as the book is almost 9 megabytes in size thanks to all the illustrations, the Stanza app may choke and require a reboot the first time you load it, but after that it opens fine. I suspect the wrapper version of Stanza is optimized for the book’s large size.)

Here’s how to pull it out:

1. Go to iTunes’s “Applications” screen, right-click “iManual,” and choose “Show in Windows Explorer.”
2. Right-click the iManual.ipa file, choose “Open With” and select a zip application such as WinZip or WinRAR.
3. Tunnel down the folders to Payload > iPhoneMissingManual.app and extract the file singlebook.epub.
4. Rename the extracted copy something like iphone-missing-manual.epub and open it with your ePub reader of choice.

Given that the “official” e-book version costs $24.99, getting the $4.99 iPhone-app version and pulling the ePub file out is not only convenient, it’s also a big savings!

That being said, for use on my iPod Touch I actually find it more useful to have this book available to me in the app wrapper that will always open to that one book every time, rather than requiring me to close whatever else I might have been reading in Stanza first.

I think I will end up deleting the copy from my “normal” Stanza’s file list and keeping the app version on my iPod instead—I am not in any danger of filling all ten of my home screens yet.